


If on a winter's night a Queen of Narnia

by Syrena_of_the_lake



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Atlantis, Calormen, Charn, Dimension Travel, Gen, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon, Spare Oom, The Problem of Susan, Wood Between the Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26089654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrena_of_the_lake/pseuds/Syrena_of_the_lake
Summary: You may have heard it said that Aslan will never tell you any story but your own. Many are the stories told about Queen Susan: courtiers’ tales, Narnian legends, Calormene whispers, schoolyard taunts, British murmurs, odes and laments. Susan has her own stories — and they didn’t all end with a train wreck. (Which ones are true, you ask? That is up to you.)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 68
Collections: Narnia Fic Exchange 2020





	1. If on a winter's night a Daughter of Eve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shirawords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirawords/gifts).



> For shirawords, who prompted: Susan was told she couldn't go back, so she moved forward.
> 
> This story owes its structure to the postmodern novel _If on a winter’s night a traveler_ by Italo Calvino. The chapter titles also mirror Calvino’s, which formed a poem. For those who aren’t familiar with the book, all you really need to know is that each chapter is piece of a different story, told in a different style, and they intersect as part of a larger story. Think of this fic as a “5 times” type story: five (OK, six) ways that Susan’s story could have ended, and one in which it began anew. 
> 
> "I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first..."  
> \- Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

"...it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased..."

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

Autumn crisped the trees, and Susan marked the passage of another year.

She was old enough that she didn’t make a fuss over her birthday, old enough that she had to pause — just for a second — to do the math to find her age, and old fashioned enough that she wouldn’t tell. But graying hair, arthritic knees and a weak bladder were blessings her siblings had never known (or so she told herself on the dreary days when they seemed unbearable), so she bore them with grace and good humor (or an unladylike oath and a bit of black humor, depending on the day). 

Several cards arrived, from old admirers or colleagues, and a bedraggled handful of dandelions from the children next door. 

A day late, the phone rang. 

“Joy,” murmured Susan into the receiver, but her daughter was already talking — full steam ahead, just like Lucy. 

Susan let the words wash over her. She was an eddy of calm, and Joy was a torrent of effervescence. Susan had named her well.

“And in Literature we’re studying _Through the Looking Glass_ , and you wouldn’t believe how many people have never read it!” Joy’s indignation coursed through the telephone lines. “I’m writing an essay about Borgesian labyrinths, Lewis Carroll’s rabbit holes, and H. G. Wells’ _Time Machine._ You know,” she said meaningfully. Susan could almost _hear_ her winking. “Starting out on one journey only to find yourself Somewhere Else, and the trick in getting _back_ is moving _forward_. It’s like the intersection of metaphysics and magical realism. Have you read much Borges, Mum? He invented a world called Tlön, where there are no nouns. He says their books are different there, that ‘Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations.’ It reminds me of Calormen poetry, only even more convoluted.”

“There were many odes to the Tisroc’s Labyrinth, which was widely regarded as unsolvable,” offered Susan. “No Minotaurs, though — they kept to themselves in those days.” Was she rambling? Of course, so was Joy. Their conversations frequently covered as much ground as a brace of hares racing to the wood and back again, with just as much wheeling and darting about.

She had spoken like this with Edmund, once upon a time. Not even Lucy could follow once they got started.

It would have been something, to see Ed and Joy together. Peter likely would call a laughing halt to the verbal sparring within ten minutes. 

“Are you lonely?” Joy asked softly. Her voice only wavered a little.

“It is quieter, with you away at university,” Susan admitted. 

They both laughed. No one had ever accused Joy of being quiet. 

Still, there was an odd silence on the line until Joy spoke again. “Daddy called,” she said, and that explained the awkwardness.

“Did he.” Susan absently rubbed the empty space on her finger. There was no outward sign she had ever worn a ring there. Of course, there was no outward sign of the knife wound she had once received on the Ettinsmoor, either, but all these years later she still felt the phantom pain when the wind sliced and the trees groaned.

“He wanted me to tell you happy birthday.” 

For all she prided herself on finding just the right words for any occasion, Susan could think of nothing to say to that extraordinary pronouncement.

“Did you do anything special?” Joy asked. 

For a wild moment, she was tempted to say something outrageous — _I had tea with a Faun,_ perhaps, or _I rode a Lion_ — just to startle a laugh out of Joy and ease the strain from her daughter’s voice. But they had long ago promised there would be no secrets between them, and no lies.

“I spent time in my garden,” she answered instead. She had also visited the cemetery, but she did not say so. It was neither a secret nor a lie, merely an omission. “You should see my lilies.”

“I will,” promised Joy. “Soon.” 

And Susan’s heart gave a pang, because she knew the sound of a promise made that might not be kept, even through no fault of one’s own. But she did not say so. After all, they had always called her Gentle.

* * *

Autumn ebbed into winter, and then it was Christmas, and then the eventual (but never inevitable) thaw. She never would take spring for granted. 

Susan took refuge in predictability. The seasons came and went without hesitation, and so did Joy: her daughter graduated from university with honors, and then moved out into the world, trying on and casting off careers like gowns... and periodically coming home to Susan for a rambling conversation and a cup of warm cocoa, and infusing the house with light and warmth enough to sustain Susan through any winter. 

The house, too, was a comfort. A small cottage with a small garden and low stone walls that reminded her vaguely of Cair Paravel in its golden age. But time moved slowly here, and the walls never crumbled. 

Work, too, was always the same. Proofreading and copyediting and gently reshaping other people’s words. Putting up with idiots who couldn’t keep their page numbers straight, let alone their verb tenses. Marshaling the right words for the right causes... or merely placating the right people, because the bills had to be paid. 

Speeches, memoirs, essay anthologies, and the occasional fairy tale — she lived deep in the tales of other people’s lives and deeds (fictional or otherwise). It wasn’t what she had thought she’d be doing with her life. 

She had shaped her own story, once. And she had told the whole of it to Joy, starting with the bombings and the Macready and the fur coats, all the way through Tashbaan and the stag and the ruins of Cair Paravel a thousand years later. It was as if, in the telling, she had somehow exorcised a part of herself. The part that lived for adventure, the part that yearned to go back. The part that knew how to be a queen.

Still, sometimes all those old feelings surged like a tide, and Susan would fight the urge to find a horse and a bow and ride off in pursuit of something — anything. But whenever the feeling pressed in on her — that she should have made a larger mark on this world — she combated it with a sharp frown and a firm thought: she had already spent one lifetime (albeit a short one) changing one world. It was too much to ask of her to do it again, here, alone. It would have to be enough to be merely... gentle. In the lowercase. 

Besides, she had Joy. Joy, with the relentless optimism of youth, all the lessons of Narnia and none of the griefs piled on griefs. Perhaps _she_ would be the one to change this world. 

And so Susan lived. Quietly. Gently. 

In truth, she lived for Joy, which was as good a purpose as any — and better than most. When Joy moved to Australia (“Just for a year, Mum, maybe two... will you be too lonely without me?”), Susan rejoiced in every word of her daughter’s adventures. A litany of postcards decorated her living room with fuzzy marsupial faces and messages written upsidedown. Joy began to weave her own story into her letters: how Rainbow Serpent created Talking Kangaroos and came to regret it, how certain waterholes would remained full to the brim despite the grimmest drought (those were the pools that could transport you to other worlds, added Joy, which was surely not part of Aboriginal mythology — had Susan ever told her daughter about the Wood between Worlds? She must have, but she couldn’t recall...).

One winter morning, Joy attempted to play the digiridoo for her over an expensive long-distance telephone call. Susan couldn’t detect a melody, only deep-sounding static, but she watched the flames dance in her fireplace and remembered Lucy’s tale of a flute and a Faun. (Did it really happen? She never wanted to ask over the phone. You never knew who else might be listening... and she wouldn’t want to worry Joy. After all, they had always called her Gentle.)

* * *

Years passed. For Joy, Australia gave way to Poland (or was it Portugal?), and environmental stewardship morphed into social services, but Susan knew it was all connected. Her own world shrank in on her, little by little, as her limbs stiffened and her eyesight dimmed. She stayed mostly indoors during winter, relying on the repaid kindnesses of neighbors for the mundane necessities of life (delivering groceries, shoveling, and procuring a steady supply of red pens). It would have been easy to be bitter: having lost first a country and then a family, and now being reduced to a recluse, living for infrequent but beloved contact with her only living relative. But Susan was content. She owed it to everyone she’d lost, she thought. And nowadays, whenever she felt restless, all she had to do was call Joy, and live vicariously through the tale that spilled out. 

Time was mostly an abstract concept (except for deadlines — those were sacrosanct). Susan hadn’t counted her birthdays in years. And her own four walls stayed much the same, no matter the season. But Christmas still held a touch of magic for her, even after all these years. 

One year was much the same as any other, until the Christmas morning when a suspicious lump appeared in her stocking.

Susan’s first thought was a “gift” from the cat, but not even Alabaster (or, as Joy dubbed him, Alabastard) could perform the necessary acrobatics to drop a mouse carcass into her Christmas stocking where it hung from a bare nail high on a blank wall. (She had the requisite mantlepiece, of course, but nothing on it was ever safe from feline desecration.)

Dubiously, she reached deep into the stocking. Her fingers brushed velvet. Shocked, she withdrew a small drawstring bag that would not have looked out of place on an Archenland duchess’s chatelaine. The only possible suspect was Joy. But how could her daughter have managed this, all the way from Lisbon? (Or was it Lodz?)

Joy would not have given her set of keys to her father. Surely not. She knew how that would upset Susan, even after all these years. Why, she had not even laid eyes on the man for decades. (Why had they parted ways so soon? Susan didn’t like to think it was for the sheer novelty of saying goodbye before one more love could be torn away. Surely not.)

She gently pulled the bag open and peered inside. Two rings nestled there: one green, one yellow. They clinked invitingly against each other. Susan gasped and drew the bag shut again. The cord burned her palms.

Those rings had gone with her cousin Eustace to Narnia. They, too, should have perished by now.

“Father Christmas.” Susan’s voice shook. She had never thought to receive another gift from him. 

The magic rings... yellow and green. One to transport her away in the wink of an eye, and one to bring her home again. “Good heavens,” she murmured, “which is which?”

Well, it would not take long to experiment. 

She imagined herself putting on a ring and disappearing like Bilbo Baggins in _The Hobbit_. She imagined the quiet Wood that Polly had described so many times, and wondered if that poor hamster was still wandering about. She imagined another Christmas in another land, where blinding sunlight glinted off snow and bare sword blades — or was that a memory?

It was hard to tell, sometimes.

If she put it on, she would just... disappear.

Practically speaking, that was a terrible plan. What if she needed sturdy boots, provisions, a bow and quiver? Or a whistle, flashlight and Swiss Army knife? And what if she never came home? How would her daughter cope?

(True, Susan had survived more losses at a far more tender age. Which made it all the more appalling to consider.)

If she put it on, she might be spirited away to Narnia. She might be returned to her family at long last.

(But not her only family — not for many years. Not since Joy was born.)

Or perhaps, if she put it on, the ring might do nothing at all. It had been so many years... perhaps the magic had leaked out of it. Perhaps her memory was faulty and this wasn’t one of Those Rings at all, but merely a trinket one of the neighbor’s children had picked for her because it reminded them of her bedtime stories. How could she bear it, if she made the choice to leave (to go home!) and nothing happened?

Susan reached up and absently wiped the tears off her cheek. (Damn, she would have to reapply her makeup, and it was so hard to see in her dim mirror. She knew she kept getting blush in her hair instead of sweeping elegantly up her cheekbones, but mirrors in this world weren’t as bright as they had been in her first youth. Or was that wrong as well?)

“I’m too old for adventuring,” she said aloud, but she didn’t approve of how her voice and resolve wavered. 

So she took a clean tissue and delicately placed the rings inside an overly large locket that Joy had once given her for Mother’s Day. It was unfashionably bulky and a little too ostentatious for Susan’s taste, but she sighed in relief when the locket settled into place over her heart. She struggled to work the clasp, but she had long ago mastered the art of doing without a second set of helping hands.

She wouldn’t use the rings... at least, not today. But she would keep them with her, just in case. Perhaps someday, before her sight failed her utterly, she would open the locket and put on a ring and be a queen once more. Or perhaps Joy would find it years from now, after Susan’s funeral, and open it seeking solace only to find a whole new world instead. Or maybe Joy would pass the locket onto her own children without ever opening it, and a new generation of Pevensie descendants would walk hand in hand into a far-off wood, wide-eyed and red-cheeked and as young as Susan was when first she wore a crown.

Or maybe they, too, would prefer the stories over reality, and the magic would wait, coiled, until it faded from memory.

Susan sighed gently and watched her breath dissipate in the cold December air. Bother. Was the furnace out again, or did she have a window open? She would have to make sure Alabaster didn’t escape... there were so many places he could get lost in.

Susan gripped the locket until her knuckles turned white. So many places, so many choices. And the same age-old conundrum: how would she ever know if she made the right one? 

Well. It would wait, at least, until after tomorrow. 

Tomorrow was Christmas, and Joy was coming.


	2. Outside the town of Finchley

"To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished."

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

You may not know it from the stories, but Susan had always been an obedient girl.

(She had never been an obedient woman. But she was not now, nor had yet been a woman in England, and so she folded that mantle and stored it away for some future day when it would be needed again.) She still wore a girl’s face and clothes and obedience when she stood before the Lion and farewelled Narnia for the last time. (Technically, they had never had the chance to farewell anyone the first time. You might ask: was Caspian’s call perhaps a way for Aslan to make amends? Surely not, Susan would answer. Narnia’s wellbeing was far more important than four bruised hearts.)

Aslan bade her go, and she went — head held high because, girl or woman, she was still and would always be a Queen.

The Four bore the renewed sundering together as they had borne so many trials and triumphs before. Yet there was a new gulf, for Lucy and Edmund held out hope of returning. They each stood as the Colossus of old, one foot on each shore, at once a bridge and a barrier. And Peter? Her brother and her king lingered wistfully by that same shore, laboring dutifully over his books but always with a backward glance. Never quite paying attention to the world around him, because he had half an ear open for a Lion’s roar.

Susan rather thought he was missing the point.

She listened for other things: the muffled sobs of the widow Burke, alone among bedraggled petunias in her garden just off the lane. Susan brought her tepid tea and listened to her mothballed stories and wondered fleetingly if anyone had mourned them thus in Narnia — a slow lingering lament as they faded from memory. She listened for the morning’s chorus of pigeons, traffic and raucous crows, and the occasional trill of a thrush — so soft she would never have heard it had she not been listening. The more she listened, the more she heard: her mother’s unspoken worries about the changes wrought in her children, the neighbor boy’s dreams of glory like his older brother (rest his soul), the murmurs in the street and in the press about imprisonment of civilians based on little more than their family name. The hiss of her bicycle tires against wet pavement. The marvelous thundering and squealing of the trains. The soft, unremarkable sounds of daily life: a spoon clinking on china, high heels tapping on the pavement, the crackle of the radio.

So many remarkable things, unremarked upon and unnoticed by so many. (She had such thoughts often, but did not mean them as criticism. After all, how often do you stop to appreciate the way the sun catches in an unlit lamppost in the early evening, on your way home from school or work?)

It was all so _different_ than the first time she had grown up, in Narnia. And so the more her siblings fought the fog of memory to hold onto wisps of the past, the more Susan strode firmly in the present. They were missing so much! But Peter hated it when she brought up his studies (oh! What she would have given to study the _Iliad_ under Professor Hillburn), and Edmund frowned when she tried to dissect a typewriter with him (she had seen his fingers itch for a quill, his nails scrape over paper that was unsettlingly smooth compared to parchment), and Lucy’s smile trembled whenever Susan tried to interest her in Russian folklore or Celtic legends or any fairy tale other than the one they had already lived.

This world, too, had much to offer — surely she couldn’t be the only one who saw that?

For Susan remembered Aslan’s words, _look for me there._ She did not think he meant to look only for Lions in every shadow, like the others did. Of course any wrought iron lion’s head drew her eye, but then her eye would be drawn further by the perfect curls and delicate, unbreakable petals further down the gate — and then by the house beyond the gate, and the people in the house, and the untold stories that must be unfurling within...

... and so her thoughts ran, always further on and further outward.

Susan kept looking, and listening, and learning — and leaving Narnia further and further behind, as Aslan had bid her do.

You may think you know the rest of her story: how she became estranged from her siblings, their relationship fraught over the dichotomy of Narnia versus the things of our world. (Lipstick and nylon were the least of it. Susan also loved motorized vehicles that went faster than any horse or clipper ship. Indian curries, sweet and salty Chinese zongzi, Moroccan mint tea. The rhythms of jazz and the magic of radio waves and the frenetic jitterbug dancing that was at once like and nothing like a Bacchanalia.)

You may have even imagined the next chapter — the story could only go so many ways, after all. Either Susan wallowed in grief and regret, or she moved on. Either she used the rings and traveled Somewhere Else, or she didn’t. Either she made room for magic in her new world, or she shut the door. Flip a coin or take your pick.

Susan did neither. If you pressed her, she might give an impenetrable explanation about liminal spaces and false dichotomies, and you could try to muddle through and impress her. Or she might share a sly smile and a sleight of hand trick to make a flipped coin land on its edge (it was all in the wrist and a touch of the fingertips, she would say, much like archery). Or, if she saw some promise in you, she might invite you into her garden.

Susan had inherited Professor Kirke’s house and all its hidden corners, but she spent most of her time outdoors. She roamed the fields and walked the woods, always alone (but if you looked carefully, you might find alarmingly large paw prints just off the path). 

But her pride and joy was her garden. A humble weathered door (there is always a door of some kind) hid a world of riotous growth. Elegantly draped wisteria shaded a patch of forget-me-nots. Flowers you thought didn’t grow in England’s climate. Stone fountains carved with fantastic creatures, water spouting from a gryphon’s beak or a dragon’s maw. An expanse of cool, deep grass that Susan called the Dancing Lawn. And at the center of it all, her masterpiece: a living labyrinth.

You could study aerial plots and estate footprints and claim there was not enough space, even on the spacious estate grounds, for such a garden. But there was, after all, a bit of magic left in the earth where the rings had been buried so long. And Susan was, after all, very skilled at planting seeds, nurturing and tending, and waiting and waiting and waiting. She had coaxed sunflowers to weather the English clime and bloom around Lucy’s grave, because anywhere Lucy had been could not help but shine. She had built a thriving kingdom out of a frostbitten world, she had built a new life out of rubble, and she would do no less now, even with only her own life at stake. (Never before had so few people depended on her for anything. If she asks you what loneliness means, remember that, and be gentle.)

But, after all, things never did happen the same way twice. So instead of a tree like the one Digory Kirke planted, which grew and grew and was felled by lightning and became a wardrobe, Susan planted a hedge. It was the work of many years, teaching it to bend into arches and disappear around corners. Some people say Susan Pevensie’s maze shifted according to her will (or something more capricious). That unwary wanderers could become lost for days. That those who dared the labyrinth emerged somehow changed.

Susan heard, and smiled.

In the evenings, she would listen to the wind playing in the leaves and wonder whether it would answer to a familiar name if called. Sometimes, she would join the song, playing upon a little clay flute. Some people heard the wild tune and were afraid, while others laughed and held hands and recklessly plunged down the pathway between swaying hedges. The crude flute had but few holes and no embellishments. But it remembered the clay from which it had been made, sprinkled with the dirt of other worlds, and warm with the memory of the magic rings that had rested in it for so many years.

Susan played, and smiled.

This is her legacy: somewhere in her garden, even now, someone is having an Adventure.

Is it you?

As Susan might say, don’t come back too soon... but don’t stay away forever. There is a balance point between holding on and letting go. She’ll meet you there.


	3. Adorned with a ring befitting a Queen

“Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ...”

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

Susan wasn’t too old for another adventure, but perhaps she should have been old enough to know better. Or perhaps, having reached retirement and having found it unfulfilling, she was merely overdue for a midlife crisis. 

Well, she had found it now.

“The Tisroc had asked you a question, barbarian. How come you to this august realm?”

It was, Susan had to admit, an excellent question.

* * *

Lacking a better answer, she would weave a tale worthy of the Trickster god himself. Susan spared a moment’s thought to wonder if _he_ , and not Aslan, had somehow directed her journey here. She remembered her lessons on Calormene’s pantheon, and she had always felt a peculiar affinity for the unassuming Rat. In Narnia, she had once directed a network of cunning rat and mouse spies and saboteurs. She wondered how the afterlife worked, and if one of her former spies had spoken of her to the Trickster. 

Regardless, only the results mattered now. 

She had appeared in an airy circular chamber ringed with stone fountains carved in the shape of graceful flowers. Shallow channels of water guided the runoff across the room to a central pool. Susan would have to be careful not to trip in the channels. In the center of the pool rose a dais, resplendent in gold and painted tiles, and presumably connected to solid ground by a bridge or series of stepping stones hidden from her view. The room was thronged with people, and aside from a few initial cries of alarm, they had all fallen silent — presumably at her appearance. 

But it was the figure on the dais that held Susan’s attention. A wizened old woman, garbed in a robe of a gauzy material Susan had seen only once before. It was a deep, midnight blue and glittered with a thousand pinpoints of reflected light. 

Desert starsilk. Only a Tisroc could wear it.

“My lady Tisroc, may you live forever.” Susan bowed low and deep, as she had been taught, and prayed the customs would hold true in whatever age she now found herself. 

The Tisroc smiled. Her eyes were kind, although Susan knew better than to trust in first impressions. 

“Where do you come from, that you speak our tongue?” Her voice was thin, but her words held the attention of everyone in the room.

“I come from Narnia-that-was,” Susan answered. Her voice rang like a bell in the silence. 

Then the commotion began anew.

* * *

She had to deliver her tale standing, for no one brought her the customary slingback seat of petitioners. But Susan preferred it that way. Even as a supplicant, she knew how to be commanding. She wished she had a cape rather than her very British trench coat, but she supposed it looked otherworldly enough. It would have to do. 

Susan drew on an awkward mix of Arthurian legend, Narnian history and what little she had gleaned from Andrew Ketterley’s notes. She prayed it would be enough to make for good oratory, which she assumed was still highly prized. It certainly sounded more impressive than the truth: a castaway queen who lost her world because of her pride and her family because of a mundane train wreck. No, that would never do. 

“It is said the great Narnian Queen was pale of skin and hale beyond all ages,” Susan extemporized. “She helped weave the deep magic woven into the tapestry of life, the very fabric of being.” It rankled, mingling her own history with that of Jadis — and especially omitting her siblings entirely. But if any legends had survived the intervening millennia, she assumed the White Witch would have figured prominently. Susan could use that. “Her reign was a golden age for Narnia, but she fell into an enchanted sleep and was carried to a distant isle where neither time nor the cares of her world could reach her.”

“So long her country fell off the maps?” A prim young woman sniffed. She wore an insignia Susan did not recognize: a ship with three sails. Perhaps the woman was a shipwright. “Narnia is nothing more than a myth. It was never _real_.” 

“Oh, were you there as well?” Susan asked with polite curiosity. A few titters from the other courtiers told Susan how well regarded the other woman must be. But she was not here to alienate anyone.

“My world, too, had myths,” Susan said, regretting her earlier retort and responding to the heart of the woman’s interruption. “Atlantis, Tír na nóg, Avalon — all missing worlds that left a mark by their very absence. Real or not, their names rang throughout literature and history. Monarchs and empires have been judged by their resemblance to a myth.”

“But we are beyond that sort of nonsense,” protested a man. He wore the knot of a lesser vizier on his shoulder. “We have no need for your ridiculous _fairy_ stories.” Even the term he used told Susan that something of Narnia remained — in popular culture, old wives’ tales, crumbling texts — it didn’t matter. It was enough.

Susan held herself with dignity and looked down her nose at the lesser vizier. It didn’t matter that he was taller; she had long ago mastered the art of frowning down upon those who attempted to loom over her. 

Susan thought the Tisroc hid a smile behind her fan.

“Have the Imperial Cartographers then charted the higher realms of Tash’s eyrie, Azaroth’s mountain or Zardeenah’s starfields?” she asked. This was a risky move, assuming that the Calormene pantheon had not undergone a seismic shift in the thousands of years since her last visit to the Tisroc’s court.

Murmurs gave way to gasps. Susan hid a triumphant smile. Her gamble had paid off. “There are more things in the heavens and below them than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” she said, paraphrasing Shakespeare. The scribe paused, her quill dripping ink, to stare at Susan, starry-eyed.

“Narnia disappeared from the maps... and so did your army, once upon a time,” she hazarded, again relying on the dreams that had shattered her all those years ago. Never had she thought she would be grateful for them. “Do your histories not tell of a great army that marched upon a neighbor and was felled, not by any worldly opponent, but by a cataclysm? Do your astronomies not speak of a disturbance in the distant sky, of stars that rained down and disappeared forever? Do your tales not tell of the day Tash himself appeared, red in tooth and claw?” Susan’s voice shook. “If you delve deep enough into the past, you will find the shape of Narnia-that-was, like an ancient footprint preserved forever in stone.”

“I have heard of this _Narnya_ ,” said the Tisroc, a strange note in her voice. “She may be known to us only in legends and dreams, but truth may be found in such places as well. Let us suppose she truly existed, then,” and at her pronouncement, the murmurs cut off abruptly. “What of its Queen?”

“Ages rose and fell while the Narnian Queen slumbered, cradled in the depths of the earth.” Susan spun one metaphor after another, stealing shamelessly from great poets and common cliches alike, and judging their effect by the increasingly frantic scribbling of the royal scribe. Her words today, clumsy though they may be out of sheer surprise and necessity, may well echo through another age. 

“The irony,” said Susan, “is that the Queen might have saved Narnia, had she awakened in time.” She let her eyes close with very real pain, and opened them after a moment to look the Tisroc straight in the eye — something only another ruler should dare do. 

“But the Queen was not there,” said Susan, her voice clear and steady. “And for her folly, the stars fell from Narnian skies. The earth swallowed the fabled palace, and the seas swallowed the earth. And thus did Narnia perish: in fire and water, and finally subsumed by itself.”

Her dreams made for vivid retelling. Bile rose in her throat. _Forgive me, Aslan._ This part of the trick did not sit well with her at all. She was no sorceress, and she loathed using Narnia’s death as a tool of oratory. She knew she should mention Narnia’s sins, real or supposed, and its wickedness, cruel monsters, witchcraft — if anything, she thought, _those_ would have lingered in Calormene collective consciousness. But she could not bring herself to speak of anyone’s sins but her own.

But maybe she was thinking of this the wrong way. If Narnia was nothing more than an ancient myth, or a tale to frighten small children, then perhaps Susan could bring it to _life_ again, even if only for a moment.

Something moved at the base of the dais. It might have been a ripple of water, or a trick of the light shimmering on the Tisroc’s starsilk. But Susan rather thought it might have been a Rat.

“What then?” demanded the Tisroc. She knew what came next in her story, Susan could tell — and she was playing along. That, more than anything, gave her hope. “What of the Queen without a Country?” 

Susan raised her chin. Murmurs swelled throughout the room. “I have returned,” she announced.

* * *

After the furor died down, and the Tisroc bade the guards sheathe their weapons (really, Susan was flattered), she spoke again — this time, deferentially.

“My lady Tisroc, I devoutly wish you to live forever, but it is not in my power to make it so. As you can see from my own age, I am myself diminished. I used the very last of my magic to carry me here to your doorstep. I am a sorceress no longer — only a woman whose world died thousands of years ago.” Susan did not need to feign the tremble in her voice; she only hoped it did not make her seem too pathetic. She wanted to be useful, not some curiosity to be tossed aside — or worse, pitied and stared at.

Susan knew it was her pride speaking now. But she could not stop the words from tumbling out all the same. By all the gods in all the worlds, she wanted to be defined once more by what she _did_ , and not by what she had lost.

“I have also been ruler and ambassador, diplomat and teacher, builder and warrior. I almost married a Calormene prince, long, long ago. I was ready then to accept Calormen as my own land, to guide and guard her faithfully. I stand ready to fulfill that pledge. I do not beg refuge, but I humbly offer myself to your service.”

Susan was no longer the young beauty who had inspired Rabadash to write flowery odes and seek her hand. But that was of no consequence. She had always possessed much more important assets. Besides, the Tisroc herself was an old woman. Clearly the Calormenes still knew how to worship the Crone as well as the Trickster. They would see her worth. 

All the while, she could almost hear Edmund's words of caution and incredulity. Reflexively, she marshaled arguments to counter his. No, Calormen had never been her country, and she owed it neither loyalty nor responsibility. And yet, she was _here_. With no way home, she might add: the green ring had disintegrated into dust upon depositing her in Tashbaan. It would take her to no other worlds. Susan did not know enough magic to reconstitute the ash that had slipped off her finger and settled in her pocket. She could return to the Wood with the yellow ring, but would be stranded there forever. She would rather live here and be useful than succumb to the Wood's slow forgetting. 

Narnia might be no more, she reasoned, but she was still a Queen. It wasn’t just pride, was it? After all, she still had a responsibility to help people. All her old dreams, buried since the debacle with Rabadash, came crowding in: abolishing slavery, creating new opportunities for women, furthering peaceful alliances. It was ironic. When she had been Queen Susan the Gentle of Narnia, ready to accept Rabadash's hand, she would have been ill suited for that work. She had been too headstrong, too impulsive, too righteous.

Susan forced the vision away. No, she needed smaller plans now. She knew from British history that empires could be slow to change, but it would be the height of arrogance and folly to presume Calormen had been stagnant since her admittedly hasty visit all those ages ago. And in any case, she reminded herself sternly, it was not her place to change this land to suit her or to match the other worlds she’d loved. This was _her_ second chance (or third, or fourth). She would have to earn her place — and she would have much to learn about modern Calormen.

Still, surely she had much to offer?

Once, a Calormene prince had valued only her face, and Susan had forever associated Tashbaan with her folly. Now she could offer her wisdom... and perhaps be guided by another’s in turn. 

The Tisroc stood, putting an end to both her musings and the consternation that swirled among the courtiers.

"What is your name, gentle Queen?" she asked. 

Susan could not help smiling. "You have said it yourself. I am Queen Susan the Gentle, formerly of Narnia." Then her smile faltered, and she lowered her gaze. “Forgive me, my Tisroc. I _was_ Queen, but now I am simply Susan, and I am at your disposal.”

"The Calormene Empire bids you welcome, Susan of Narnia." The Tisroc pronounced the name carefully. Then she descended from her dais and walked across a pale stone bridge that Susan now saw rested just beneath the surface of the pool. It looked as though the Tisroc were walking on water. 

She stood before Susan and held out her hands. Susan clasped them; there was still strength in those gnarled figures. With the Trickster’s own luck, and Aslan's blessing (he may not rule here, thought Susan fiercely, but he still ruled _her_ ), she would serve a wise and just ruler. And perhaps some part of Narnia could live on, through her. 

* * *

In the end, the Tisroc did not live forever (they never did), but she made a place for Susan by the time she died — peacefully in her sleep, for some things had long ago changed for the better in Calormen.

In fact, Susan was ashamed to realize how much she had underestimated her new country. Perhaps she had carried some grudge all these years after all; at the very least, she had done the Calormene people a severe injustice in her own heart.

Slavery had been eradicated a millennium ago. Likewise, women’s rights had long ago been secured by the women of Calormen — the same brave women who had championed the cause against slavery. Tashbaan was much changed from the city she had known, and much improved. Ruefully, Susan at last buried the lingering hurt of old memories... almost too late recognizing the British colonial mindset that Peter of all people had warned her against, all those years ago. 

But neither was the Empire a utopia. Its military still dominated foreign relations, and even neutral neighbors treated Calormen as a dangerous aggressor, not an ally. Calormene protectorates had begun agitating for independence. The Empire was not falling — but it had begun to teeter.

Tisroc Alana was a wise, canny ruler. Rather than see her Empire splinter and crumble and crush the people in its shadow, she set out to slowly and subtly dismantle it. Or, as she told Susan in their first private meeting, “to make it furl in upon itself like a nightfern at dawn.”

That was the moment Susan decided she would never need the yellow ring. 

She was kept under heavy but discreet guard at first, but even this was relaxed sooner than Susan had expected. She never asked the Tisroc outright why she had not treated her as a threat. She assumed, along with the rest of Calormen, that the Trickster god had sent her a dream about Susan’s coming (or that the Tisroc, being a shrewd ruler, invented such a dream to justify her decision, for even a Tisroc could not make autocratic decisions based on instinct alone). Susan thanked Aslan and the Trickster both for sending her a friend and a home where she could find meaning in her life once more.

Still, despite their long years of friendship, Susan was shocked to her very core when, from her deathbed, the Tisroc summoned her as the ritual Last Visitor.

“What of your children?” Susan blurted as soon as she entered the Tisroc’s rooms.

“We have said our farewells,” said the Tisroc. “And we are at peace. I asked you here for a different purpose.”

Susan knelt at the Tisroc’s bedside and prepared to confess how she had come to Calormen: the rings, the trainwreck, everything.

“I will not ask you to tell me your full story, Susan of Narnia.” She coughed, and Susan moistened a sponge for her cracked lips. Calormen’s medicine far outstripped the thin knowledge Susan retained of nursing in England, and perhaps rivaled even Lucy’s cordial for efficacy. But even the most sophisticated science could not reverse old age. The Tisroc was old beyond telling, and Susan blinked back tears at the thought, for she had become very dear to her.

“Attend me now, Queen Susan,” she commanded.

“Just Susan,” she demurred, as always.

“Hmm.” The Tisroc arched an eyebrow. “When you came here, I did have a dream — yes, I know you have wondered — but it came not from Tash nor Zardeenah nor the Trickster. It was a Lion that sang to me while the stars danced their orbits.” Susan sucked in a startled breath. The Tisroc’s weathered face cracked in a grin. “The Lion sang to me of a far-traveling daughter, a Queen who would set aside her crown to serve, a woman who could use her position as an outsider to see truths that were veiled from me, to help stubborn old men and women reach compromises, to reach into the past and shine light on what once was dark and hidden... no matter how uncomfortable that might make us. To tear down the blocks of an empire _gently,_ so that something greater may be built upon its foundation.”

”You’ve seen Aslan.” Susan wondered that it did not hurt, knowing that He had visited another instead of her. Perhaps she had at long last tamed the impatient pride that once ruled her. That reunion would happen in Aslan’s own time, not in hers. “Is that why you took me in? Because Aslan asked you to?”

The Tisroc’s smile gentled. “You have been like a daughter to me. I saw your past and I saw your future, and I saw that you would bring an old woman comfort in her last hours. You have accomplished fine things here, yes — but nothing that could not be accomplished by another. Except for this.” Her thin, paper lips trembled. “You do not kneel at my bedside because I commanded it so.”

“I am here because my friend is dying,” said Susan thickly. “And because I have lost many dear ones without the chance to say farewell. That is not a mistake I will repeat.”

The Tisroc lifted a gnarled hand to press over hers. “I have heard your story, Queen Susan of Narnia. Your losses are only losses. Not a mistake. Have you forgotten your Lion’s words? Once a Queen in Narnia, always a Queen. To this I add Zardeenah’s proverb: once found and claimed, a sister can never be lost.”

At last Susan let her tears fall.

The two women, Tisroc and Queen, remained side by side through the long night of labored breathing and creeping cold. And when the dawn rose, Susan stole back to her rooms to collect the ashes that had once been a green ring. A green ring that had brought Susan across all the worlds to find her dearest friend. She took the velvet bag from its hidden cubby in her headboard (behind the engraving of — what else? — a crouching rat), and tucked it in the Tisroc’s funerary treasures.

Perhaps it would take her on far travels somewhere in the afterlife.

* * *

The Tisroc's chosen heir, a favored niece named Luella, was the one to give Susan her official title of Ambassador. 

Susan did fulfill her dearest ambition: she orchestrated archaeological expeditions to Archenland (now a protectorate of the Calormen Empire), Galma, and the islands of the Eastern Sea. There, scholars found remnants of the Telmarine era, and older still — pottery shards, Dwarven silver and other relics of Old Narnia. Susan hoped to live long enough to see the technology evolve for deepsea exploration beneath the cold northern waters where Narnia once lay. (Then again, perhaps she would rather not know how true-to-life her nightmares had been.) Regardless, it was enough to look at Imperial maps and see that the Starry Sea now bore an asterisk and a legend: Narnia-that-was, with a lion rampant. 

Years later, when Susan became too old to travel to neighboring kingdoms or archaeological digs, she spent her days dictating letters and essays to her devoted scribe — the same one who witnessed her arrival all those years ago — and reclining in the warmth of the Imperial gardens. There, she drank cool mint tea and smelled the sweetness of the orange grove that ringed the inner keep. The Tisroc herself would visit Susan there, and they would speak of olden days and future hopes. 

"Which gods do you pray to?" the Tisroc asked her one day. "Do you still speak to your Lion, or are you truly one of us now?"

"I will always be Aslan's," Susan answered slowly, "in all the worlds. But I ask Zardeenah's blessing before a journey, though I am no longer a maiden. Is that what you wish to hear, my Tisroc?"

Tisroc Luella, First of Her Name, High Empress of Calormen (may she live forever) laughed and squeezed Susan's hand. "I rather thought you might be the Trickster's," she said. "You appeared out of thin air bearing tidings of a country that had been wiped from the maps a thousand years ago, and you threw the whole realm into such philosophical turmoil that my aunt was able to push all many reforms through with little opposition. Little by little, the Empire is diminishing, starting with our armies. Wherever you truly come from, Susan, you are a blessing. I only wondered who to thank for it."

Susan chuckled. "Before I die, I will tell you the secret of Spare Oom," she promised. 

"But not today," the Tisroc said swiftly. "We have many years before that day. And today I wish to bask in the presence of my friend, and in this sun, which is too bright for secrets." 

Obedient as always to the wishes of her empress, Susan settled back in her chaise, ready to listen and advise. 

* * *

The next morning, a voice interrupted her slumber before sunrise. 

“Will you destroy the ring?” asked the Rat.

Half asleep, Susan almost answered as she once would have: Friend, Countryman, My Good Rat. Just in time, she realized who her visitor must be.

“My Lord Trickster.” She sat up in bed, arranged her robes and inclined her head. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

The Trickster chittered with laughter. In the distance, thunder cracked. “Impertinent little queen,” he said, almost fondly. “Not yes, not no, very crafty.” 

Susan bowed her head modestly. 

The Trickster scoffed. “None of that. Take credit where credit is due — unless it is due to me.” His eyes were bright and dark all at once, like stormclouds flashing with silent lightning across the Shifting Sands.

Susan opened her hand, baring the ring in its little silken pouch. Which was odd, as she could have sworn it was safely hidden behind the knothole in her headboard, but then her head was still muddled with sleep. 

“Will you take it, then, as tribute?” she asked. 

She flattered herself that the Trickster seemed startled, but it too was probably an act. (Still, his ears _did_ twitch mightily.) Somewhere outside, a donkey brayed with such suddenness that Susan smiled. She and the rat exchanged a sly grin in memory of Rabadash.

“Keep it,” said the Trickster. He wiggled his nose and twitched his whiskers, and a little alabaster box appeared on Susan’s desk. She obediently placed the pouch inside.

“Shall I hide it in a chest, inside a crate, inside a ship, inside a whale?” Susan asked. The old Calormene proverb about a sorcerer’s hidden treasure reminded her of another story from another land... but somehow the details were foggy, and the story remained out of reach.

The Trickster eyed her knowingly. “It would be safer,” he said. His tail rapped on the box. “Worlds aren’t meant to mix.”

Susan made an aborted grab at the box, but closed her outstretched hand before touching the cool white stone... or the deceptively small god who hunched beside it. “Safer for whom?”

The Trickster winked.

Susan blinked, and found that night had fallen again. She looked down at her desk and found that her goblet of wine was drained, and it appeared that she had nibbled on the cheese and dates until they were all but gone. There was a small alabaster box next to her plate. It was a plain little thing with no engraving to speak of, but pretty all the same. Susan liked the way it the stone caught and reflected the lantern’s light.

She shelved it next to the gifts from the Ambassadors of the Independent Isles. Then, on second thought, she tucked it away inside a very ugly vase from New Telmar. There was no sense in inviting questions she couldn’t answer, after all. Just as soon as she remembered which dignitary had given her the trinket, then she could display it again. In the meantime, perhaps that Telmarine vase didn’t deserve such a place of prominence... they were only a colony, after all, and not of high standing in the Calormene Empire. Which meant they probably had yet to receive and enact her latest legislation on the Rights and Responsibilities of Sentient Beings (she had argued long and hard for that title, rather than Human Beings, but for the life of her Susan could no longer recall why). She would have to remedy that. Susan clapped for her maidservant and tried not to blush when she asked for a second plate of cheese and dates. She hadn’t realized she was so hungry.

“More wine, Ambassador?” asked the maidservant. 

Susan almost frowned at the impertinence, but she _was_ thirsty. One would almost think she hadn’t touched her own supper — but then, where could it have gone?

A curtain twitched, and a tail whisked, but Susan never noticed. 

The Trickster was satisfied. Memory was a tricky thing. Making a mortal forget his visit was one thing, but making a box forget itself — now that was a more subtle feat. The remaining ring would remain well hidden, even from Susan herself. And she was _his_ now, all his own, and Calormen’s too. It was all to the good for his land and his people. She had always stood up for the little people, the ones no one else cared about... except him. Without knowing it, Susan had served him well, and now there was no danger of her leaving, not for a long time to come.

That pesky Lion could wait his turn for once. 

* * *

The day she died, Susan asked for her Tisroc to be her one Last Visitor.

"You never told me about Spare Oom," said the Tisroc, with a squeeze of her old friend's hand, "but I suppose you are entitled to some secrets."

Susan's eyes were closed and her breath was shallow, but her lips curved in a smile. 

The Tisroc noticed the little alabaster box on the nightstand, and wondered where it came from, but the thought slipped out of her mind as soon as it formed. Instead, she resolved to see it buried with Susan, since it clearly meant so much to her. And then her vigil was interrupted by one of the palace cats — a sleek, golden tomcat the Tisroc had never seen before — scuffling with a rat. Any other day, the Tisroc would have ordered a servant to remove the cat and deal with the vermin. But she had not become Tisroc by ignoring the portents. 

Later, during the funeral rites, the Tisroc broke all tradition by naming two gods, one Calormene and one both obsolete and foreign. "May the Trickster and the Lion Aslan bring her home to the starry sea from whence she came."

Inside the elegantly engraved coffin, and inside the plain alabaster box, the yellow ring at last crumbled to dust, as if it somehow knew it would never return to the Wood from whence _it_ came.

And thus Susan of Calormen, formerly of Narnia-that-was, passed once more into legend. 


	4. Strides into the Wood between Worlds

"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition."

\- Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

When Susan finally entered the Wood between Worlds, it was with a plan and a bucket. She had learned all she could from the library that once belonged to Andrew Ketterley, the old sot, and from her own research. The rings would only get her so far; she would have to do the rest herself. 

She did not let herself be distracted by the seeping peace of the Wood. She marked the exit from Earth's pool out of an abundance of caution, but she did not plan on coming back. 

_The elements of success are simple,_ Ketterley had written. _Earth and water._ It was a formula as old as time, or perhaps older. Susan did not flatter herself that she could improve upon the original. But she had an advantage: she already knew there was more to magic than Ketterley's crude experiments. And there was one more element that Digory Kirke's unlamented Uncle Andrew had critically lacked. 

Hard work. 

Susan had little trouble finding the pool that had once been Narnia's. Now a featureless slab of unblemished stone, it sat next to a scar in the earth. 

Charn.

The bright green grass all around was painful by contrast. Susan carefully placed the rings atop the smooth rock. "Stone tables may be more than they seem," she reminded herself aloud. Then she turned, hands on her hips, to regard the blight that had once been Charn.

The dry, cracked ground looked like the first pictures of the lunar landscape that had so recently been broadcast around the world. Charn's pool was now a pocked, desolate circle of packed earth and red dust. It was as barren and lifeless as anything could be. 

Susan picked up her bucket and walked to the nearest pool. There she paused, considering. 

Was there the least possibility that what she was about to do could affect another world? Even traveling there and back again, before and after, she would have no way of telling, unless the changes were catastrophic. She could spend several lifetimes trying to find the answer without ever knowing for sure. And all her plans would be for naught if she stopped now.

"Guide me, Aslan," she murmured. 

She dipped the bucket in the pool and drew the smallest amount of water, barely enough to cover the bottom. She stepped back. The surface never even rippled. Surely such a small amount of water could make no difference, she told herself. Surely she would _know_ if it were truly wrong. 

She poured the trickle of water over the circle of blasted earth. It soaked in immediately without even a shadow of moisture. Susan returned to the first pool and made a little mark with her toe at the edge of it. Then she moved on. 

Time held no meaning. She walked further and further afield, visited hundreds of pools, taking less than a cup of water apiece, carefully marking each so she would not draw twice from the same world. 

How many worlds _were_ there, she wondered. And then the doubt set in again.

_What if you are dooming hundreds of worlds? Would it not be better to take all the water from just one? An ugly world, that deserved its fate?_

"I will not create another Charn," she told herself sternly. The pools had not shown the least indication of suffering for her trespasses. 

And next to Narnia's stone, the blasted circle of earth was softening. 

Hundreds of pools turned into thousands. For all she knew, she had always been in this wood. She had no memory of any other place. She had no name and no purpose. Still she trudged through the green, green grass. Still she carefully filled her bucket, no more than a cupful per pool, never mixing the waters of different worlds. Drop by drop, she poured the waters of life back into the earth. 

Sometimes, she wondered why. She'd had a reason once, she thought. But it was lost to the stillness of the Wood, and couldn't possibly matter anymore. It would be so easy to stop. But she didn't. 

Not until she found herself staring dumbly down at an unmarked pool next to the only stone she had ever seen. 

There was something different about it. The edges were muddy, and the grass around it was trampled and worn. But the water was clear and deep. She dipped her bucket in, moved by sheer muscle memory. And then she stopped. There was no toe mark at the pool's edge, that was true enough. But hadn't she been pouring water onto a scar of earth next to a rock just like the one next to this pool? She gently emptied the water back into the pool, set her bucket down, and sat on the stone to think. 

It looked smooth, but something was poking her in a most uncomfortable place. She rolled off the stone. She lay there for a while, in the grass and churned mud. After a few minutes or eons -- however long it took the grass to grow straight again and fill out the bare patches -- she decided to solve the mystery of the stone that looked flat but wasn't.

Except the stone was flat, and perfectly comfortable to sit on. She frowned. Without knowing why, she felt around the base of it. Her questing fingers encountered something smooth and round and metal, like the bucket, only different.

"A ring," she said aloud, holding it up. It was green, like the grass. She placed it on the stone and frowned again. It didn't look right. It looked... lonely.

She grubbed about in the grass again, more urgently, and when her fingers touched something smooth and metal, she grabbed at it greedily, ripping a few blades of grass up by the roots. 

"Another ring!" she exclaimed in triumph. It was a lighter, brighter color than green. A color she had never seen before. _Sunny_ , a stray thought supplied the word. _Like the sun_.

What was a _sun_?

She placed the ring on the rock, and her gaze swung automatically to the pool beside it. The pool that had once been less than a pool, she was sure of it now. Whatever a _sun_ was, it made her think of warmth, and that made her think of coolness, and that made her think how nice it would be to swim. 

Something in the back of her mind, some urge she could neither name nor explain, made her put on one of the rings -- the familiar green one, the color she could name. Then, at the last moment, she grabbed the sunny ring too, so it wouldn't be lonely. She knew what it was to be lonely, she thought. At least, she had once. 

Then she jumped in the water, eager for the sensation of coolness, for something _different_. 

* * *

She landed feet-first on hard, packed ground. 

Her first, confused thought was to wonder where all the water went. Then awareness of her self and her mission trickled back. Horrified, she scrabbled in her pocket and heaved a sigh of relief upon finding the sunny ring ( _yellow!_ its name was _yellow!_ ) safely inside. 

She wasn't trapped. She could still go home. 

_Home_. That meant Earth. England. (But not Narnia, never again to Narnia.) 

"My name is Susan," she said aloud, and almost wept with the knowledge. She took a blind step forward and almost ran into a dark-haired boy.

"Pardon, Sorceress!" he exclaimed. Then, to Susan's astonishment, he dropped on one knee and cowered. "Pray do not blast me, unworthy servant though I am!"

Susan stifled her first impulse to comfort him. One overriding need drove her. "Where am I?" she demanded. 

" _Pardon_?" The boy stared up at her. 

"What world is this?" She hoped she would hear the answer over the pounding of her heart. 

The fear on the boy's face became tinged with awe. "You are powerful indeed, Sorceress Susan, to have traveled to other worlds!" He looked at her hungrily. "Let me be your slave, I swear I will be faithful!" 

Unnerved, Susan grabbed the boy by his shoulders and pulled him roughly to his feet. " _What world_?" she hissed. 

"Why, mistress, you must have had strange travels! But now you may rest, for you are safely on Charn, the center of the universe." 

* * *

A few judicious words and a carefully worded promise to tell tales of another world, and Susan was installed in the boy's household. His name was Petrus, which was all he needed to say for Susan to take him into her service. 

"I know you will be loyal," she said to him, "for it is in your very name."

Clearly Petrus had no idea what she meant by this, but he faithfully wrote it in his little notebook, which he soon filled with her words. 

Now free of the Wood's numbing effect on her mind and memory, Susan's mission was sharp and clear. 

_The elements of success are simple: earth and water._

And hard work, and time. 

It was more than she had dared hope: Susan had managed to revitalize Charn. Now for the difficult part. Filling the pool, she had theorized, would turn back the clock. The only question was how far. 

"I will tell you a secret, Petrus," Susan said. The boy's eyes grew wide. He snatched at his notebook, but Susan reached out a hand to stop him. "A secret not to be written, told or shared in any way. You know I have traveled to other worlds." 

Petrus nodded eagerly. "Because you are a great sorceress," he exclaimed. 

Susan smiled, neither confirming nor denying the assertion. "I have also traveled through time," she confided. 

Petrus's eyes grew impossibly wider. 

"I have another secret." Susan gripped his arm. It went against the grain to trust so deeply, so soon, but she needed an ally, a research assistant, a _local_. He was only a boy. 

But Peter had been no older when he was crowned High King. 

Susan bent over to press her lips against his ear. "I am not from this world," she whispered, "but I am here to save it. I am here to prevent the destruction of Charn."

* * *

The problem was, Susan had very little information to go on. Jadis had never been kind enough to name her predecessors or the date she had used the Deplorable Word. 

Susan had helped rebuild a country once before, as a child queen. Now she was grown (twice over), older and hopefully wiser, and ready for the challenge of redeeming a lost world.

 _Hah,_ Susan thought bleakly. She was alone and desperate to change the tide of history. To save Charn, if it could be saved, yes. But ultimately, for Narnia. For Lucy, Edmund and Peter. For their parents, Eustace, Jill, Professor Kirke and Miss Plummer (all these years later, and she still couldn’t bring herself to use their given names) and all the others, nameless to her but beloved to someone.

For Susan had never been able to shake herself of the feeling that, had her siblings not gone against Aslan’s decree and tried to return to Narnia, the train would not have crashed. Taken further: if they had never gone to Narnia, they would not have died trying to return to it. If the Witch had never been to Narnia, there would be no need for four Pevensies to retake the thrones at Cair Paravel. No prophecy, no evil time, no hundred years of winter. Perhaps the Deep Magic of Narnia’s creation itself would be different, with no Witch to influence the eventual end of the world. (Susan could still hear her shout: “All Narnia shall perish in fire and water!”)

It therefore followed, if young Polly and Digory had never awakened Jadis... if Jadis had never destroyed Charn and left the bespelled bell to be found... if Charn itself were to be saved...

Susan would have her family again.

_The elements of success are simple: earth and water. Hard work and time._

_Gentleness_ did not enter that list, but Susan was determined to keep her old moniker. Wind and water were Gentle, after all, even as they wore away stone. 

* * *

It was the work of decades, becoming Queen again. Spells and politics were the least of it, and she was no stranger to time or hard work. 

But in all her planning, she had never reckoned on finding a family.

Petrus’s parents, it turned out, had been killed in one of Charn’s many wars. He had found shelter with his uncle, a man of middling talent and power but enormous ego, and rage to match.

The first time Susan saw him beat Petrus, she stopped him with a Word of Command. She didn’t know for certain that it would work until that moment, and had a knife in hand as a last resort.

The second time, Susan was too late to stop the beating. 

There would be no third time.

Afterwords, Petrus (whose hero-worship had gone beyond the bounds of reason) spread the tale to other urchins of the city, and Susan acquired an unlikely groundswell of support. 

She also acquired a second apprentice. Eomond had a talent for finding things just when Susan needed them most: an alliance with a banking house, a spell to ward against sabotage, a hidden entrance to the Imperial Palace. 

He also found Susan a third apprentice.

Her name was Lusia, and Susan could hardly miss the significance. What she did not understand was the _meaning_ of it all. Surely these orphans were not sent by Aslan (wherever he had been before singing Narnia into being) to replace her dead siblings. 

Then she wondered if she had gone mad. If she was, after all, a sorceress born of Charn. If there was no England, no Narnia, no LucyEdmundPeter. If she had hallucinated all of it... to what end?

“Come back,” Lusia would whisper during these moments, for she had an uncanny way of knowing when Susan was untethered inside her own mind. “Come home.”

And Susan’s thoughts would spiral back to herself, and she would kneel before Lusia like a supplicant, and vowed that this time would be different. She would _make_ it different. This time, she would save them all.

* * *

To be Queen in Narnia was to be part soldier, part shepherd. Ruling Charn was like trying to control a chariot with a six-team of bloodthirsty warhorses interested in nothing more than snapping at each other’s necks and racing at breakneck speed. Susan was always no more than a heartbeat away from disaster.

When the wars started, she was resigned. She ruthlessly stomped out insurrection, doing what she could to preserve life and build some semblance of peace out of the ashes, over and over again.

They called her reign Magnificent, her wars Just, her battles Valiant.

No one ever called her Gentle.

The history books dubbed her only The First of Her Name, but in the corrupt houses of Charn she was known as Queen Susan the Implacable. In the streets, where the urchins ran, where the common people toiled, where the unfortunates of the world suffered, she was beloved as Queen Susan the Sister. Petrus was her champion; Eomond crafted her legacy; Lusia never left her side. 

Despite the ceaseless fires and the prickle of malevolent magic everywhere she turned, Susan was almost content. Her siblings almost lived again. She almost _belonged_.

Then Jadis made herself known. And Susan knew one of two things would happen: either Jadis would destroy Charn and history would repeat itself, inexorably — or Susan would defeat her, and _everything_ would change, inevitably. 

With every new battle, Susan’s power grew, for she had become skilled in blood magic (though she still loathed it, she could not deny the way it sang in her veins). Lusia went about with a pinched look on her face, and Susan longed to tell her that she no longer fought solely for her dead sister and brothers, but now also for her apprentices. Her family.

Jadis would slaughter them all, if she won. 

* * *

Susan should have seen the end coming. She had come to Charn for that very purpose — and still she failed.

At first, failure looked very much like victory.

Susan mounted the steps of Jadis’s stronghold with her apprentices at her side and an army at her back, and an inner mounting elation that she tried to keep in check. 

“Sister Queen,” scoffed Jadis, even as Susan took the last step.

Susan paid her no heed. “Victory,” she breathed, steeling herself to strike the final blow — and in so doing, to at long last save everyone she had ever held dear.

Jadis’s smile was as cold and cruel as Susan had ever known it. “But not yours.”

Too late, Susan perceived the danger. She raised a Ward of Protection to cover the children, knowing it was futile, but unable to stand still and watch as she lost everything. _Again._

The unmaking of Charn was nothing like the dreams Susan once had of Narnia. There was no fire, no screaming (no more than usual, that is), no stars falling from their heaven. There was a loud crack, which made Susan’s heart jump in a painfully familiar way, and then there was silence. 

Curious. In the sudden darkness, she could almost make out the outline of... a rough stable door?

Ridiculous, she thought as the world winked out. Grief rose in her throat like bile (PetrusEomondLusia!), but she pushed it aside fiercely. 

All this had happened before Narnia ever began. Young Susan Pevensie had yet to be sent to the countryside, guided by beavers, crowned queen, tossed back and forth between worlds like a tennis ball, and ultimately bereaved... and she had yet to learn the magic that would send her to Charn.

If time itself was winding back upon its tail like a serpent, then young Susan Pevensie would have plenty of time to try again. She could _make_ things turn out differently. She knew what was going to happen; she could avoid all the pitfalls.

Next time, she swore, she would do better.


	5. Steps into the Wood between Worlds

"And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day... I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life, which continues even in this place ..."

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

Susan had never believed her story had ended in Narnia. Nor had it ended _with_ Narnia, any more than she had stopped breathing along with the rest of her family. There was merely... a pause. An ellipsis in her life's story. 

It lasted seven years.

Seven years of school and then work, of banalities, of managing the little details which had once come to her so easily, with a whole kingdom at stake. Now, she was lucky if she remembered to pay all the bills on time.

Maybe the stakes of her small life simply weren't high enough anymore, not for someone who had grown up during two wars. (After all, compared to Nazis, Miraz or the Witch, her landlady's frown was hardly formidable.) It wasn't that she didn't have money; more estates had been settled upon her than she knew what to do with. It felt like a dowry, only no prince waited for her by a stone altar. It hardly mattered, of course. She had rejected more than her share of princes — all for very good reasons — and she had no cause to pine for one now.

Susan had very little cause to do... anything, really.

Apathy. Grief took some people that way, she knew. She had also spent so long caring for so many other people that she wasn't sure she had anything left for herself. 

Perhaps that was why she opened Pandora's box. (Technically, it was Eustace's beetle collection, with two sparkling green and yellow rings tucked under a particularly large stag beetle's wing.) 

(It _would_ be a stag, Susan thought wryly.)

It wasn't that she thought using the rings was a particularly good idea. It was just that she couldn't quite recall why she had been so vehemently opposed, once. 

She knew she should plan. She should have a store of prepared supplies. She should make arrangements with her solicitor in case she never returned. Or... her thoughts trailed into abstraction. In all the times she had been pulled precipitously between worlds, she had never been prepared before. 

Why start now?

Susan took a deep breath, although she knew from Polly’s stories that it wasn’t necessary. Then she put on the ring. A quick twist, and she was standing in the coolest, most refreshing grass under the deepest, shadiest trees. 

The Wood between Worlds was a lush, hushed temptation. The drowsy trees beckoned. Oh to lie beneath their branches for a moment, and to let the last of her cares slip away—!

But something in Susan finally rebelled. Something long dormant, whisper-quiet, audible only in the utter silence of that wood. It was unnerving, how quiet it was. Perhaps it was that unnatural silence that propelled her to her feet again. 

Or perhaps it was the memory of sound. Of a roar.

(Lion or train? Did it matter? Was there even a difference?)

Susan jammed the green ring on her finger and jumped in the nearest pool without looking. (Why start now?)

* * *

“Pardon, Sorceress!” A scruffy boy jumped out of her way and tipped his rough-woven cap at her. “Arrival point is that way, mistress.” He jerked his thumb at a distant row of fluted columns. The scamp grinned, revealing two missing teeth front and center. “So’s you knows next time.” Then he scarpered, leaving Susan gaping after him.

_Sorceress?_

Granted, she had appeared out of thin air. But the boy had reacted like this was nothing out of the ordinary, save for her location in the middle of a bustling avenue. 

Susan looked down at her feet. They weren’t even wet from the pool, she noted absently. But the ground itself held her attention: the street was paved with marble.

Where in all the worlds was she?

“Pardon, Sorceress?” Susan turned at the demure greeting. A young woman, no older than Lucy had been, stood politely off to one side. Her clasped hands were white at the knuckles. 

“Yes,” Susan replied. She was wary of the title, but she had always calmly accepted every role thrust upon her.

“You’ll be wanting the next door down, Sorceress. That boy you saw, he’s one of the orphans.” She avoided Susan’s eyes. “You’ll be taking your pick of the boys, I suppose.”

Susan didn’t reply.

“Please, oh _please_ , mistress!” the young woman burst out. “Please don’t take Petyr away! We’d... I mean, the little ones... well, everything would fall apart without him.” Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

Deeply unsettled, Susan reached out to grasp the woman’s hands. “I have no intention of depriving anyone of their rock,” she promised.

The woman smiled gratefully, although she looked confused. Maybe _Peter_ didn’t mean _rock_ here. Then she curtsied and gestured at the next door down the street. “They’ll be waiting, Sorceress.”

“Let them wait,” Susan said. “You must know a lot about the orphans, living next door. Tell me — whom would you choose?”

“Eymund,” the woman responded promptly, and Susan wasn’t even surprised. “He’s a born sorcerer’s apprentice if ever I saw one. But he won’t come.”

Susan’s smile hurt her cheeks. “Not a tractable child,” she said knowingly.

“He won’t leave without his sister.”

“Lucy,” Susan murmured.

The woman looked at her in awe. “Ilusy, yes, that is her name. Petyr says she is special, but I do not think she has magic.”

Susan’s smile came more readily this time. “There are other magics,” she said. “Tell me, what is your name?”

“I am Susynn,” she answered obediently. “Might I ask your name, Sorceress?”

Reeling slightly, Susan answered with the first _sorceress_ that came to mind. “Morgan le Fay.”

* * *

It did not take long for Susan to realize that, even in a world brimming with magic, some names held innate power. In Atlantis, whatever small magic had clung to her from Narnia was magnified a hundredfold — which made Susan a run-of-the-mill sorceress of middling power and moderate influence.

It did not take her much longer to realize this was a world sliding toward destruction... and there was nothing she could do about it.

She was no Queen here, not even a true Sorceress (although she had picked up a surprising amount from watching Eymund — who likely knew she had none of her purported knowledge, and cannily was helping her remedy that as best as he could). But there were things she could fix, and she had started right away.

The orphanage had been in a deplorable state. If not for Petyr, it would have been a far sight worse. Susan and her alter-ego, Susynn, swooped in to fill the vacancy left when Susan ejected the former matron with an impressive-sounding curse (winning her an instant friend in young Eymund). The next step, of overhauling a corrupt system that generated an appalling number of orphans as a factory for apprentices, would be more difficult.

Atlantean tradition held poor families in thrall, and the only way out of debt was often to orphan a child or two — in exchange for a generous charitable settlement from the Crown — and incidentally reducing the burden on family finances. Only the most talented children were orphaned, for they would be snatched up sooner or later by some busy sorcerer in need of an apprentice. 

Susan was horrified by the practice. She could see all too clearly how it had evolved from some well-meaning monarch’s original decree to ensure livelihoods for orphans. Fortunately, she found ready coconspirators in Susynn, Petyr, Eymund and Ilusy. The implications of their very names were staggering: did parallels to her family run throughout all the worlds? Or had her very entry to Atlantis caused a ripple effect and conjured an echo of her family? She tried to put all these questions aside in favor of the most pressing: namely, how to help her almost-family conquer a corrupt system and save Atlantis from itself. For Aslan may not have summoned her, but her mandate was as clear as ever: to guide and guard those who looked to her. 

Such was the duty of a Queen.

* * *

It would be the work of decades, taking the Crown of Atlantis. Susan dove into the work willingly. Corruption had settled like ash over the coals, but Susan had studied under the best smiths in Narnia — and the fire had never gone out of the city. It had only been tamped down by too many indifferent rulers.

Susan aimed to change that.

The forging of alliances was a test of skill, patience and imagination. Breathing ideas in the right ears, stoking long-dormant flames of righteousness, gently shaping and tempering the people around so they would have the strength to resist the Crown’s retaliatory blows when they came.

It was work Susan would have done, had the Telmarines driven the Narnians back underground. Now, Talented orphans and talentless peasants alike drew around Susan like an archery corps submitting their fletches for inspection. It was good work. Satisfying. Necessary. 

Still, she began to feel... not impatience, nor restlessness, but a sense of being out of place. Atlantis needed a seismic change of rule, true enough, but it didn’t need _her —_ not in the strictest sense. Susan said nothing of this feeling to her ersatz family, but instead redoubled her efforts to teach what had taken her decades to learn. (And to learn a little bit of magic from Eymund, in turn... one never knew when that could come in handy.) Petyr was a natural leader, of course, and Ilusy was something of a seer — people would follow her wherever she led, compelled by the truth from her lips. Eymund was a natural at navigating the undercurrents of politics, and at steering popular opinion where he wished it to go. 

But Susynn was the linchpin. The one who had helped Petyr protect the other children within the orphanage, the one who saw the straight way through a twisted maze. The one the other three all instinctively looked to for guidance.

Susan knew her time was near.

The day before their hard-won audience with the Crown, the day before submitting their formal list of grievances and proposed amendments to the Atlantean Charter, Susan announced her decision. 

“I must leave today,” she said.

Four faces gaped at her in dismay.

“But all your work,” protested Petyr.

“Was done on your behalf,” said Susan, “and no one is more qualified than you to continue it.”

Eymund scowled mightily. “But your lessons,” he began, and then cut himself off. His brow furrowed again, this time in thought. “Have been leading up to this. Haven’t they?”

“But what about us?” asked Ilusy, her voice small.

Susan gave in, and wrapped the girl in a tight embrace... in the farewell she had never been able to give her sister. She looked up at Susynn, who stared back at her with wide eyes in her pale face.

“I’m not here to save the world,” said Susan, standing up. “But you,” she gripped Susynn’s shoulders, “you could. _You Four_.”

Petyr, Eymund and Ilusy stood a little straighter. They were all _so young_ — and yet, no younger than the Pevensies had been on coronation day at Cair Paravel.

Susynn squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Yes,” she said. 

* * *

When Susan appeared back in England, she once again nearly knocked into a scruffy boy. He was flanked by two girls, presumably sisters, judging by the family resemblance. 

“Are you a sorceress?” asked the little boy greedily.

“Nonsense,” said one sister imperiously, “there’s no such thing.”

The other sister tossed her head. “She’s a governess. Aren’t you?” 

“Yes,” Susan replied to both questions. 

"What's your name, then?" challenged the first sister. 

"Ours is Ketterley," said the second sister with a shy smile. 

Susan almost swallowed her tongue. Somehow, perhaps because of the ambient magic suffusing Atlantis, the rings had performed their duty too well, and sent her back to England — two generations before she had been born. Before Narnia's very creation. Before the _rings_ had been created. Surreptitiously, she checked her pockets: sure enough, the rings were gone, as if they had never been. In their place was a handful of dust.

The dirt of Atlantis.

Professor Kirke's tales rang distantly in her mind. Andrew Ketterly had stolen the dust from — who? His governess? His fairy godmother? — and used it to craft two sets of rings. One of those sets had been lost along with Narnia and her family. The other had now been unraveled by time. 

Susan spared a thought for her double back in Atlantis. _She_ at least had a chance to change the future. _Her_ path was not predetermined. 

Just as suddenly as the envy struck, it receded in favor of vertigo and a tide of fear. If Andrew Ketterley had never stolen Atlantean dust and created the rings, then young Digory and Polly would never have found themselves at the dawn of time in Narnia. There would be no reason for any Son of Adam or Daughter of Eve to be called to Narnia. Digory's mother would have died. Decades later, there would be no magic wardrobe. Edmund would never have become Just. Eustace would never have been Undragoned. Susan herself would never have gone to Atlantis and begun the slow but strengthening resistance against a corrupt Crown. All their friends in Narnia, all the lives they had touched both there and in England... it could all be undone, if time did not progress as it had before. 

The air felt thick. It was hard to breathe. 

Susan could no more turn back time than she could have stopped the fateful train by boarding it, or saved Narnia by returning to it. Yes, the end had been horrible — but first, there had been a beginning, and age after age of _life_ in between. Who was she to change that?

Once a Queen in Narnia, always a Queen. 

There was only one choice, and Susan made it without hesitation, in favor of all the worlds she had ever loved. 

Belatedly, she answered the children with the identity she must now assume: "I am Mrs. Lefay."

* * *

Little Andrew was an odious child, but Susan kept her mind firmly fixed on the eventual ending: first rings, then Digory and Polly, then Narnia and Aslan, then the whole of her lives in Narnia, England and Atlantis, and all the people she had cared for along the way. They all depended on her keeping Andrew Ketterley close. In that context, the boy's fits of temper were easy to bear. 

She kept the dust of Atlantis in a small alabaster box that little Letty Ketterley had bought for her in a curiosity shop. Susan treasured it, alongside the ammonite fossil that Mabel had found and given her. At least the girls would benefit in some way from her instruction, just as Susan basked in their presence. It was not a bad life. From time to time, she felt a wave of vertigo, wondering whether the dust was really from a dead world, or if she and the other Susynn had managed to avert that fate for Atlantis. Wondering whether she had the right to ensure her timeline's continuity, or whether she should prevent Jadis's return from Charn at all costs... but no, that way lay madness. She could not walk every road through the labyrinth of time and space. "One step at a time," Susan said aloud. 

Andrew nodded seriously, and she caught a glimpse of the magician he would become. 

"Never touch the box," Susan warned him one day, “and especially never open it, and most especially never touch whatever is inside.” With every phrase, she knew the temptation would grow. Little Andrew was a little sneak, but not nearly sneaky enough to hide the avarice her words conjured. And not nearly subtle enough to evade her rather heavy-handed use of reverse psychology. 

“Never ever, cross my heart and mud in my eye,” Andrew swore.

Susan choked back a laugh. remembering Polly’s tales of a well-meaning elephant planting Uncle Andrew upside-down in the mud like a tree. She wished she could tell that story to Letty and Mabel. Instead, she read them Arthurian legends and recited all the fables she could remember from Narnia, Calormen, Archenland and Atlantis. She passed on the lessons Eymund had taught her: small magics, spellbinding, ley line tracing, minor conjurings. She trusted that this would be enough to begin the journey. 

Mostly, she waited.

Susan knew the broad strokes of what would follow. She would do something unwise, possibly with magic, and be sent to prison, and eventually be sent back home again on her deathbed. She would extract a promise from young Andrew Ketterley to destroy the Atlantean box — a promise he would never keep. When she died, he would take the box and the dust and begin his career as a middling magician. He would make the rings, and set everything in motion that had already come before.

All would be as it had been — as it should be. (Who was she to contradict Time itself?)

In the meantime, there was still work to be done: the ordinary, insignificant work of life.

“Pardon, Mrs. Lefay?" Mabel and Letty stood in the doorway, hand-in-hand. “We’ve come to ask...” When Mabel faltered, Letty continued: “Could you teach us magic too?”

Or maybe not so ordinary. Susan smiled gently at the girls. “Yes,” she replied. 


	6. And beholds the still waters pooled there

"And as well, I say, this might be the time when I can convince myself that all my pasts are burned and forgotten, as if they had never existed."

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

Not every story has a happy ending. Susan knew this from the time she was a young girl, reading Grimm’s fairy tales to Lucy. 

Lucy was enthralled by the magic and monsters, the twists and turns through dark woods. Susan read dutifully, but inside she despised the _grimness_ of it all. Toes cut off to fit inside a glass slipper. A mermaid wasting away with no tongue to plead her love. A red-hooded girl, not unlike Lucy, blithely trusting and in bitter peril, skipping through the woods... and the wolf slain for her sins.

Susan empathized with all the characters. She wanted to make a happy ending for _everyone_. That, Edmund told her, was the root of her trouble. 

(Well, being the little snark he was at age nine, he had actually told her “You talk like a grownup but you’re no better than Lucy, believing in stupid fairy tale endings!” which amounted to much the same thing in Susan’s mind.)

She _did_ get her fairy tale ending... for a while. The problem was, it wasn’t really the end. After they returned through the wardrobe, their lives marched on back in England. And back in Narnia, time marched on without them. Susan see-sawed through time and space, and was secretly relieved when Aslan told her that her Narnian travels were at an end. Her heart couldn’t have taken much more of it: repeatedly building friendships and a future and having it all repeatedly torn away. 

Her first thought, upon hearing of the train wreck, was that she should have seen it coming.

Life wasn’t a fairy tale. No happy ending could ever really last.

With each funeral — for she insisted on separate celebrations of each lost life — Susan withdrew a little more. She spoke little of her family, and never of Narnia (who would she tell?), and it was easier to pretend it had always been that way. Finally, she sold all her inherited estates and moved away from England entirely.

Susan Pevensie had used up her store of happy endings, even temporary ones. But she’d be damned if she let her story end there.

* * *

In Sardinia, she set up a kiln. Local potters flocked to her, for she charged next to nothing and had a way of selling their work to tourists for a handsome profit — all of which she turned over to the potters. She was something of a mystery to the locals, not least for her seeming lack of business sense. But the children soon learned they could go to Susan with all their troubles and find a patient listener and mentor. 

After a year, Susan moved on.

In Romania, she anonymously set up a women’s clinic and went to work in it herself as secretary, office manager and makeshift nurse. Wearing that public face, she was less a mystery to the locals, but by the time she trained her replacement and left two years later, her coworkers were surprised to discover they knew little about Susan beyond her name and her renowned gentleness. 

She moved on further still to Australia, where she set up a daycare and charmed all the children with her fairy tales. Tricksters, lions, witches, unicorns, stars that sang... the endings were not always _happy_ ones in the traditional sense, but they were _satisfying_. The Trickster sent the cruel farmer a crop of hailstones. The kind boy who freed the dingo from a trap grew up to become a doctor. The witch that everyone had feared saved a village from a plague, and was welcomed. The star that fell from the sky found happiness teaching astronomy to the children of the earth — and so on.

Later, parents would ask their children where the stories came from. Were they English folk tales? Aboriginal oral tradition? Romanian myths? And the children invariably answered, mystified: they came from Miss Susan.

After three years, Susan returned to America and roved from state to state helping good people run for mayor, city councils or school boards, and then fading into the background when her work was done. Thank you letters circulated through small town postal offices in vain, for Susan never left a forwarding address. All paychecks addressed to her went undeposited. But wherever she went, the children thrived, and spread her stories.

She always left before any one place or person could become dear enough to lose. But she also always left things better than she found them, with small kindnesses that would be remembered long after her name was forgotten. 

Susan moved through the world like a stream: nourishing where she passed, slipping through cracks in the rocks, and always, always moving onward. She had no desire to leave a canyon in her wake (she would not inflict that same emptiness she felt on anyone else), no desire to make a bigger mark on the world (that was a job for a queen, and what was a queen without a country?). 

When a stream dried up, a deer could still find green grass along its former banks. What more could she ask for than that? To do some small good in the world, however transitory, could be no less worthy than any of the titles she had borne before. It was not, perhaps, the ending she would have wanted for herself once upon a time. There would be no happily ever afters. But at least it was an ending she _chose,_ and not one that had been thrust upon her. 

Someday, Susan knew, she would die. Most likely alone. She would leave no bereaved, no heirs, no written record of what had come Before. The names Pevensie and Narnia would be consigned to oblivion with no one to miss them. This should have made her sad, but as Susan signed the papers that would leave her dwindling fortune to a dozen worthy causes, all she could feel was relief. 

It may not have been the legacy of a queen, but it would be _hers_. 


	7. What story down there awaits its end?

“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

Italo Calvino, _If on a winter's night a traveler_

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy. She was four years old, as imperious as Peter had been at his Most Royal, and Susan supposed these things ran in families.

So she told her daughter a story about a little girl who found a forest in the back of a wardrobe. A girl who found a Faun in a witch’s cave. A girl who found a Lion in the dawn after the darkest night. A girl who ended a spell of winter in Narnia, ended a spell of stillness in trees, ended a spell of invisibility in a magician’s house. A girl who sailed to the end of the world and beyond. A girl whose name meant Light.

“Is it true, Mummy?” asked Joy.

“Yes,” said Susan.

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy. She was six years old and still poked her head in every wardrobe, cupboard, closet and hidden space to check for pine needles and snow. She wore a moth-eaten fur stole perpetually around her thin shoulders, in case she should stumble across a magical winter. (“It’s always best to be prepared, Mummy.”) 

So Susan told a story of hot sands and bright sun on burning metal, a story of veiled ladies and veiled threats, a story of soldiers and sunbaked walls and a midnight flight from danger. 

Joy shed her fur stole and hung on every word. 

“Is it true, Mummy?” she asked, breathless.

Then as now, memories of Tashbaan merged and blurred with memories of Tunisia. Two wars, two deserts, two desperate flights from disaster. 

“Yes,” said Susan. 

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy. “One with a happy ending.”

Susan took a deep breath and told a story of a train crash that was only the beginning. A story where the Four returned to Narnia in her hour of utmost need, the eleventh hour, the hour when the skies threatened to go dark. A story where Narnia cast off the darkness of false lions and held off the darkness of invading armies and, inch by inch, turned darkness into light. 

Afterwards, Susan knew what her daughter would ask. Every possible answer lodged in her throat like arrowheads: sharp and unyielding.

“Is it true, Mum?” asked Joy.

Susan stroked her hair. “Somewhere,” she said, somehow forcing the words past the arrows and the tears. “Somewhere there is a world where it is true.”

“So... yes,” said Joy, puzzling through the unusual response.

“Yes,” said Susan, but it was more prayer than answer.

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy.

Susan began to tell the story of her engagement. It had been at Professor Kirke's old estate, naturally: where all the greatest adventures of her life had begun. 

She did not get very far before the barrage of questions began. 

"Did Daddy surprise you?" Yes, he surprised her, considering it had been several years since they had last seen each other. He had always been impulsive, but showing up out of the blue with a smile on his face, pine needles in his hair and a gold ring in his outstretched hand was unpredictable even for him.

"Did he get lost?" Yes, he did, for he had not yet learned how to read the woods. That was something Susan would teach him in time: the language of moss and trees and tracks. (As a matter of fact, his approach through the trees had been no surprise at all; warned by her dog and the crows about a strange man trying to sneak up on her house from behind, Susan had nearly skewered him with an arrow until she saw who it was — but she tactfully omitted that part of the story.) 

"And maps?" Joy laughed. It was an old family joke: navigation was best left to Susan. Which, considering the number of time she had been lost in other worlds, was rather ironic, but Joy was young yet for irony.

“Where do I come in?” Joy interrupted again, bouncing on the bed. “Am I at the end of the story?”

“No,” said Susan. “This is just the prologue.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “The story _begins_ with you.“

“Is it true?” asked Joy, her wide eyes shining. She gripped her plush wolf by the paw. 

“Yes,” said Susan. 

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy. “A new one. An exciting one.” This was quite the demand, given that Susan’s stories never happened the same way twice, and always had exciting things like magic doorways, battles, singing stars, lost worlds, wolves and Lions and Tricksters. But Susan knew she was lucky that Joy asked at all. Most children her age had outgrown fairy stories.

Susan remembered what it was to want to be grownup. And she remembered the bitterness of gaining her wish, and losing so much more.

Perhaps it was time for a different kind of story.

And so Susan told a story of the time she and Lord Peridan had flown by gryphon to the Tisroc's palace in Washington, D.C. and stolen the vice president's briefcase under the Penguin's very nose. (In glossing over the secrets she was still not allowed to tell, she muddled some of the details, and knew her husband would tease her about it later. But since, at the moment, he was clutching the doorframe of Joy's room and trying not to laugh, Susan chose to ignore him.)

“Is it true, Mum?” asked Joy. Awe won out over incredulity. 

Susan paused, considering. “Someone once said that some things are true and some are lies, but all are good stories.”

“But is it true?” Joy persisted.

There had been no gryphons in Washington. And yet, her fairy tale version of events had come close enough to getting half her family jailed under the Official Secrets Act. 

“Yes,” said Susan, relenting.

* * *

“Tell me a story.” Joy’s voice crackled down the telephone line. Even from so far away, Susan could hear the longing in her daughter’s voice, Valiantly disguised from everyone but her mother. 

Most people said homesickness would pass. Susan knew better than most that it never left entirely. Every place she had ever loved was still with her.

Where else did stories come from?

“Once there was a young woman in a land far from home.”

“Narnia?” guessed Joy, perking up. “Or Calormen? Or Washington?”

“Australia,” said Susan. A place she had never been, but Joy had sent her so many postcards that she could almost imagine it. When the silence dragged on too long, Susan added gently, “It’s your story, Joy. You just need to step out your front door and write it.”

Joy’s laugh was watery, but it was still a laugh. “Like Bilbo Baggins? You step onto the road, and there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to? I’m already in Australia, Mum, I can’t get much farther.”

“Yes,” laughed Susan. “Yes, you can.”

* * *

“Tell me a story,” said Joy. Her face was pinched with the pain of childbirth; Susan remembered it well.

And so she told story after story of Joy's escapades as a small child, aided and abetted by her father. The time the two had nearly broken the chandelier with an "airplane ride," or climbed on the roof to watch the stars come out, or scratched Gandalf's secret sign in their front door with a letter opener, hoping a party of Dwarves would invite them on an adventure. The time at the zoo that Joy had howled in conversation with a wolf. The time she and Susan discovered an old trunk in Professor Kirke's attic and picked the lock, both half-hoping to find a hidden world inside, but neither disappointed at the collection of rusty antiques (although Susan had kept safe custody of the rapier until Joy had outgrown most of her clumsiness). 

Susan paused for every contraction, and to wipe her daughter's brow. 

Hours later, the story reached its natural conclusion. “And then Joy knew the full meaning of her name," said Susan, "when her own daughter was born.” 

“Is it true?” Joy gasped, reaching for the infant.

Susan’s own smile felt as radiant as the sun. Joy’s burned even brighter. 

“Yes,” said Susan. 

* * *

“Tell me a story,” prompted Joy. 

Susan’s granddaughter giggled and burbled something that sounded like “door,” which was as good a place as any to begin. It had been a long time since Susan had told the story of Narnia, but she was hardly likely to forget. She started with the wardrobe, of course, and the lamppost... and Lucy. 

In her lap, little baby Lucy squealed with delight at hearing her name in the story.

"All the best adventures began with Lucy," said Susan. 

Little Lucy's eyes drifted shut around the tea party with Tumnus. The flutesong and figures dancing in the flames had always been a marvelous transition to naptime.

“I used to believe you, you know.” Joy’s voice was wistful. “When you said it was true.”

Susan hardly knew what to say. The thought that Joy might someday stop believing in Narnia had always been with her, but Susan had never asked. It wasn't as painful as she had expected. Not with Lucy snuggled in her arms and a lifetime of stories stretching before them.

"I can't imagine growing up without your stories. Or Daddy's airplane rides." Joy sniffled. "I miss him."

Susan closed her eyes. "So do I." 

"But you'll be here to tell her, won't you, Mum?" asked Joy earnestly. "You'll tell Lucy all your adventures in Narnia, and in the service, and all the others?"

"Yes," promised Susan.

* * *

Susan settled stiffly in the chair and held up a hand to forestall the customary question. Joy looked at her, concerned. “Mum?” she asked softly.

Susan smiled and shook her head. “Your turn,” she said, and settled her granddaughter in her lap. Her gaze strayed momentarily to the little alabaster box on the mantle, and her thoughts to the rings nestled inside: one green, one yellow, one gold. None of them would fit over her swollen knuckles, now. But that wasn’t why she kept them.

Her story had not ended with Narnia, nor with her siblings, nor with her husband. So many people and places were lost to her now. So many endings. And yet she was content, because every end had been followed by another beginning.

And because all the best stories began with Joy. 

Susan’s smile was gentle — and as radiant as the sun in the southern sky. “Tell me a story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may recognize a few of Susan's stories from these fics:
> 
> The gryphon adventure in Washington D.C. is from Rthstewart's brilliant _[The Queen Susan in Tashbaan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/136373/chapters/195392)_ , which introduces Wing Commander Reginald Tebbit, alias Lord Peridan, and Susan as his partner in spycraft (and, in this story, perhaps Susan’s husband... but I’ll leave that up to you). If you haven't read it yet, go now and discover the wonders of Rthverse! (Start with _[The Stone Gryphon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/122870/chapters/172847)_.)
> 
> Susan alluded to adventures in Tashbaan and Tunisia, based on my story, _[The Rule of Threes Raid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4620429/chapters/10532769)_ , set in the same ficverse.
> 
> The AU of the Last Battle where everyone lives and Narnia lives on is told in full in _[revisionist history](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7924045)_ by underscored, and it is amazing and you should go read it right now!
> 
> Lastly, my chapter titles were also inspired by Italo Calvino's, which form the following poem or story of its own:
> 
> _“If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end? he asks, anxious to hear the story.”_


End file.
